The New Republic

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Yesterday, a massive ice island four times the size of Manhattan snapped off of Greenland's Petermann Glacier. Ominous, no? A disturbing sign of a warming planet? Well… actually, it's hard to say. It's true that, in a broad sense, Greenland has been losing ice faster than it has been accumulating snow in recent years. The thing's clearly melting. But linking this one specific glacier calving to global warming is more difficult, and something many glaciologists are reluctant to do. READ MORE >>

In the latest issue of Mother Jones, Julia Whitty has a great story on how the BP oil spill is likely to affect the complex ecology of the Gulf for years to come. The piece is too hard to summarize, and is well worth reading in full (she covers possible affects on a wide range of different habitats and species), but this section in particular—on tubeworms of all things—underscored how little we know about what all that dispersed and dissolved oil will do to the region: READ MORE >>

A great random tidbit from Stan Cox's new book, Losing Our Cool, about the invention of ozone-depleting CFCs: READ MORE >>

Now and again you hear Russian officials sound pretty blithe about global warming. In 2003, Vladimir Putin joked that a little extra heat would help Russians "save on fur coats and other warm things." More recently, a spokesman in the Natural Resources Ministry put it this way: "We are not panicking. Global warming is not as catastrophic for us as it might be for some other countries. READ MORE >>

Gregg Easterbrook has an interesting look back at how car reviewers helped enable America's addiction to gas guzzlers—a trend that, in hindsight, helped bring down Detroit: READ MORE >>

So what happened to the millions of barrels of oil that leaked out of BP's Macondo well? Where did it all go? Here's a chart from a new study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (click to enlarge): READ MORE >>

Hey, it's the U.S. Senate. What did anyone expect? Harry Reid's now yanking even the stripped-down, hyper-modest energy bill from consideration until after the August recess. Republicans, along with a few Democrats like Mary Landrieu, had strongly opposed the part of the bill that would remove the liability cap for oil companies that spilled crude into the sea. READ MORE >>

Annie Lee at China Hush relays the future of public transportation in China: the "straddling bus," which glides over other cars on the road. (Okay, it's technically called the "3D fast bus," but straddling bus is more apt.) READ MORE >>

Quick, which gets subsidized more heavily around the world, fossil fuels or renewable energy? Bloomberg crunches the numbers and finds that it's not even close—oil, gas, and coal get a whopping twelve times as much total government support: READ MORE >>